"Where," she wondered, "were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to slaves but to do away with slavery?"

For two years she supported herself with manual work in Urbana—mainly washing, ironing, and caring for children—while attending those university classes she was interested in. Then at age 18 she decided she had had enough of classrooms and moved to New York City to get into real life.

It had become clear to Dorothy while a student that she wanted to be a journalist, but, without a degree and still in her teens, finding a newspaper job was no easy thing. None of the city's mainstream papers offered her a job. Finally she went to New York's one socialist paper, The Call, and there she got a job, starting at $5 a week. She had moved from reading about radical-change movements to direct participation.

Along this path, Dorothy developed her lifelong connection with the poor, the down-and-out, and all those who were on or near the social garbage heap.

The other key event in her life was her religious conversion. It came about more slowly and followed a more tortuous road.

Along the way was an unhappy love affair that ended with an abortion, a short-lived marriage with an anarchist, and publication of her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin.

Later, in her venerable years—having done so much good in the world, having saved so many lives, and having brought so many to religious faith—many came to regard Dorothy as a saint. Of course the last thing anyone struggling for sanctity wants to lay claim to is a halo.

"Don't call me a saint," she occasionally said. "I don't want to be dismissed so easily."

Perhaps another reason for Dorothy's resistance to admiration was that she believed people would think quite differently about her if they knew the whole truth of her pre-Catholic life and the fact that she had caused the death of her own unborn child.

Nothing horrified Dorothy more about her own past than the abortion. This memory was so painful to her that the event was only implied in the vaguest way in her later, Catholic autobiographical writing. There was even a period in her life when she made an effort to track down and destroy as many copies of The Eleventh Virgin as she could find.

She once told her friend Robert Coles about a time when she brought this book-burning effort of hers to the attention of a priest who was hearing her Confession.

The priest laughed. "He said, 'My, my.' I thought he was going to tell me to stop being so silly and mixed up in my priorities.

"I will remember to my last day here on God's earth what that priest said: 'You can't have much faith in God if you're taking the life he has given you and using it that way.' I didn't say a word in reply. He added, 'God is the one who forgives us, if we ask him; and it sounds like you don't even want forgiveness—just to get rid of the books.'"

One consequence of the abortion was that Dorothy felt that the damage done to her womb by the surgical procedure made any future conception impossible. She would never bear another child.

But several years later, in 1926, while living on Staten Island with her common-law, anarchist husband, Forster Batterham, she did become pregnant. The event seemed to her a genuine miracle, and something perhaps even more than that: a revelation of the mercy and forgiveness of God. She was overwhelmed with the desire that her child, once born, would have the religious faith that most inspired and challenged Dorothy herself.

She wanted her child to be baptized in the Catholic Church. But this was no easy matter. There were many obstacles. The most difficult was the passionate antipathy of her husband for every form of religion, but most of all the Catholic Church. Like Dorothy, Forster had a deep sense of the injustice in the world, and it seemed to him that the Catholic Church was not only silent in the face of injustice but often collaborated in it. When a nun began to visit Dorothy to instruct her in the Catholic faith, Forster would leave, banging the door.

Dorothy and Forster's daughter, Tamar, was born in July of 1927. Dorothy herself wasn't baptized until December 28, after a final hard break with Forster that had everything to do with the religious chasm that had opened ever wider between them.

While struggling, as a single parent, to earn a living as a freelance writer, it took Dorothy another five years to solve the most difficult quandary of her life: to find a way to bring together her radical convictions about an unjust social order and her religious faith. Practically all radicals were atheists, while practically all Catholics seemed to think very little about social injustice and what they should do about it.

Dorothy occasionally wrote for two Catholic magazines that had a concern for social issues, Commonweal and America. It was for these two publications that she covered a communist-inspired "Hunger March" that walked from New York City to Washington, D.C. and which, along the way, was the object of much panic journalism and police brutality. Finally, by court order, the marchers, all jobless men and women, were allowed into Washington to bring their petitions for jobs, health care, and unemployment benefits.

Dorothy stood on the sidelines watching the ragged procession carry its banners through "the tree-flanked streets of Washington,...joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women mounting in my heart." They made her feel how insignificant and puny had been her work since becoming a Catholic, "self-centered and lacking in a sense of community."

She felt that surely Christ had a great love for these people, even if they regarded themselves as unbelievers and wouldn't be caught dead in church.

It happened to be December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Dorothy went to the unfinished Shrine of the Immaculate Conception near Catholic University and prayed in the crypt.

"There I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor."

The next day, returning to New York City, she met Peter Maurin, the French immigrant who spiritually was a descendant of Saint Francis of Assisi. Between Peter's visionary ideas and Dorothy's down-to-earth talents as a journalist, a newspaper called The Catholic Worker was born.

Almost immediately after the first issue of The Catholic Worker was published in 1933, it became part of a movement that today is represented by many houses of hospitality and other communities scattered across the United States and existing in other countries. The Catholic Worker movement has become well known for offering an example of radical Christian living that centers on hospitality but which also protests violence and injustice. Many in the Catholic Worker movement, not least of all Dorothy herself, have gone to prison for acts of civil disobedience.